Ricky Ponting backs up Kevin Pietersen’s England bullying claims

Pietersen has made many claims about the problems he had in the England dressing room.

Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting has backed up Kevin Pietersen’s claims that there was a culture of bullying within the England dressing room, the Guardian reports.

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The former Nottinghamshire batsman alleges that England’s bowlers “ruled with fear” and heavily criticised fielders for dropping catches and misfields.

While former spin bowler Graeme Swann has stated that this wasn’t the case, Ponting has sided with his old rival Pietersen and claims that England captain Alastair Cook should have been stronger and taken action to stop the bullying.

“We saw them doing it, Anderson was always the same, and Swann,” Ponting said in the Sydney newspaper the Daily Telegraph. “The pointing of fingers and you’d hear a few expletives if there was a misfield or a dropped catch.

“The guys who were doing it were the so-called leaders. That’s where the captain has got to come in, not wait and let little things turn into big things. That’s what it sounds like has happened in this England team.”

Australia’s all time leading run scorer also states that he could see divisions in the England side long before last winter’s Ashes tour.

“They had lot of very good players that were able to achieve a lot of success as a team,” he said. “But if you could just get inside of them and start pulling them apart, we always had a feeling they would implode pretty quickly and that’s what’s happened over the past 12 months.

“I wasn’t surprised with Trott [leaving the Ashes tour], I wasn’t surprised with Swann retiring when he did. When the ship started to go down, he jumped off pretty quickly, and now all the Pietersen stuff.”

Pietersen has made the claims in his autobiography after a confidentiality agreement with the ECB expired last week.

It is the first time the 34-year-old has spoken about the events surrounding his sacking as an England player.